Fifth IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium

The Institute organized the Fifth IDRBT Doctoral Colloquium on December 10-11, 2015. The aim of the Colloquium is to network with technology researchers, share knowledge and learn from each other and explore emerging areas of research in various domains of technology. The 2-day event had 18 research scholars from reputed institutions like IISc., ISI, IITs, IIMs, IIITs presenting their research.

Dr. A. S. Ramasastri, Director, IDRBT, in his Welcome Address, provided a glance of the research work being carried out at IDRBT in the niche area of Banking Technology. He highlighted the key contributions and achievements of the IDRBT to the Indian Banking and Financial Sector and encouraged the researchers to contribute their best to Banking Technology.

The Colloquium was inaugurated by Prof. P. J. Narayanan, Director, IIIT-Hyderabad. In his inaugural address, Prof. Narayanan spoke on "Research in the Digital Era: Some Thoughts". He highlighted the following key points:

Digital Revolution: Information Disruption

Several services (Banking, e-commerce, railway reservation, entertainment) have undergone tremendous changes as result of digital revolution

Life improved physically/materially for large sections of world population due to Industrial Revolution (in 1800s)

Digital Revolution includes – digital representation of things/concepts in digital forum for storage, digital manipulation (processing of the representation for different effects), digital communication (faster transmission of information to long distances), enabled by powerful computers, efficient algorithms, and creative individuals

Railway reservations and banking make classic cases of the use of digital revolution

Data Analytics helps to improve the services provided to the consumers, if information is digitized and collected in one place

Research challenges include storing, organizing, securing and analyzing data

Research with academic depth including research publications, impacts and research maturity needs to be focussed

Evolutionary or revolutionary – research that makes a difference

In the era of digitization, data is the king but is plentiful and noisy. Opportunities are plenty. One needs to deal at the highest point of research/knowledge hierarchy.

The Colloquium also featured talk on emerging issues of technology research by eminent faculty from top academic institutions. Dr. Biplav Srivastava, Senior Researcher, IBM gave a talk on "Open Data for Financial Innovations in the Developing World", highlighting the following few key points:

Innovation depends on data, analysis and timely access

Open data is an important resource for quick and timely access

Challenges lie in authenticating the data – either of an individual, a company or the government

Financial innovations which are cost effective, reliable should reach the needy for which open data would be useful

The quality of open data can be enhanced and accelerated too by using common analytic patterns

Encourage publishers to use meta data tags and enable research.

This year 18 Ph. D. scholars from various reputed institutions like IITs, IIMs, IIITs, NITs, ISI and IISc. presented their research in the Colloquium. The forum provided an opportunity for the research scholars to demonstrate and discuss their research ideas and get feedback from an eminent panel to improve their work. The details of the scholars and the topic of their presentation are as under:

S. No.

The Topic

The Scholar

Institution

1.

A Predictive Framework to Early Detect Popular Hashtag Compounds

Suman Kalyan Maity

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

2.

Open Source Social Media Analytics for Intelligence and Security Informatics Applications

And the winners are:

First Prize:K. Ramachandra Murthy, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, for his contribution entitled Moments Discriminant Analysis for Supervised Dimensionality Reduction. The 1st prize consisted of INR 1 lakh and a citation.

Second Prize:Subhadeep Sarkar, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, for his contribution entitled Delay Optimization in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)-based Healthcare Systems. The 2nd prize consisted of INR 50,000/- and a citation.

Third Prize: The third prize was shared by the following three research scholars:

Monika Dhok, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, for her contribution entitled Type-Aware Testing of JavaScript Programs.